IoTellect

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Maintenance and Automation Engineer of Steirer Präzisionstechnik GmbH

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a small precision metalworking shop. CNC milling, turning, grinding. We make components for automotive and medical

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire IoTellect to accomplish?

• First, we needed real-time visibility into energy consumption per production line. Our electricity bills kept climbing, and we could not tell which machines were driving it.
• Second, we wanted to catch equipment running unnecessarily outside production hours — nights, weekends — and stop paying for power nobody was using.

SOLUTION

How did you find IoTellect?

Online Search

Why did you select IoTellect over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The scope was fairly focused: connect all our major energy consumers to one monitoring system and make the data usable for day-to-day decisions. We started with a pilot on two production lines, then expanded to the full shop floor. Key deliverables:

Connected 12 power meters and 4 PLCs across CNC milling, turning, grinding, and our compressor room. Mix of old Modbus meters and newer OPC-UA devices. No hardware replaced.

Built a real-time energy dashboard showing consumption per line, per shift, and per machine. Our operators and shift leads can see at a glance where the power is going. 

Configured alerts for equipment running outside production hours. If a compressor or pump kicks on during the weekend, the system flags it. 

Trained our shift leads to use the dashboards themselves — no IT middleman needed for daily checks. 

Delivered within about five weeks from first install to fully operational across all lines. The main result was not a report or a document. It was finding a compressor running at full load every weekend when the plant was empty. We adjusted the schedule and cut our monthly energy bill by roughly 15%. That paid for the platform within a quarter.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The most concrete outcome was a roughly 15% reduction in our monthly energy bill within the first quarter. We identified a large compressor running at full load during weekends when the plant was empty, plus two CNC machines idling overnight instead of shutting down. Fixing those schedules alone covered the cost of the platform. Beyond the cost savings, we now have real-time visibility into energy consumption per line and per shift. Shift leads check the dashboards daily and flag anomalies without my involvement. Alerts for off-hours equipment runtime mean we catch waste within minutes, not at the end of the month when the bill arrives. We also eliminated the manual process of walking around with a clipboard to log meter readings. That data is now live, accurate, and accessible to everyone who needs it.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Project management was straightforward and not overly formal — which worked well for a company our size. We had a single point of contact from their support team who walked us through the initial setup and stayed available throughout the rollout. We set a rough five-week timeline at the start. The pilot on two production lines was up in about two weeks, and the full rollout across all lines was completed by week five. So yes, they delivered on time. No missed deadlines. When we got stuck on some Modbus register mappings early on, support responded quickly — usually same day, sometimes within a couple of hours. It was always a real person, not a scripted chatbot. They remoted in once to help us sort out a driver config that I had miswired. No drama, just fixed it. The only minor friction was that documentation for some of the more obscure protocol settings was a bit thin. But support filled those gaps whenever we asked, so it did not slow us down in practice.

What was your primary form of communication with IoTellect?

Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The thing that stood out most was how they handled the gap between documentation and real-world use. The docs are decent but not exhaustive — yet every time we hit a wall, an actual engineer replied quickly and talked us through the solution. Not a chatbot, not a ticket that disappears for a week. That level of support is rare, especially at this price point. I was also genuinely surprised by the driver coverage. We had a mix of old Modbus meters that other vendors told us to replace and newer OPC-UA devices. The platform handled both without drama. No custom code, no hardware swap-outs. And the pricing deserves a mention. Transparent from day one. No per-tag metering, no surprise charges when we added more machines. For a small company budgeting every expense, that honesty mattered almost as much as the technology itself.

Are there any areas for improvement or something IoTellect could have done differently?

The documentation could be more detailed, especially for protocol-specific settings and troubleshooting. We hit a couple of Modbus register mapping issues early on, and the answers were not in the docs — we had to rely on support. Support was excellent, but not everyone wants to pick up the phone for something that should be searchable.